


Fallen

by V762CAS



Series: Veni, Vidi, Amavi [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Not GRAPHIC but moderately detailed injuries, Technically AU (Regeneration from Eight to Nine - none of that War Doctor business), regeneration fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 13:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9443963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V762CAS/pseuds/V762CAS
Summary: Introspective of the (literally) war-torn Eighth Doctor as he regenerates into Nine.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a moderately short one-shot that I pounded out after rewatching the 50th Anniversary Special. I’ve always thought of Eight and Nine as the respective soldier and haunted veteran of the Time War (sorry John Hurt but frankly… that was some nonsense) so I wrote this to mentally deal with the regeneration from Eight to Nine. Warning for the slightest of gore.

The smoke burned at his lungs with each labored breath. By some miracle, his respiratory bypass was still passably functional, allowing him to avoid breathing for several long minutes at a time. He couldn't last long, though - and each time he gasped for air, his lungs would inflate with poisonous heat and the pain would return worse than before. 

The right side of his jaw was cracked, bent inward and threatening to break through the skin of his cheek. His left heart was badly damaged but still pumping, sending thick blood straight into his chest cavity. His right ear was all but deaf. The torn skin of his leg was steadily leaking blood and ash onto the grating. Nonsense though it was, in light of the sheer noise dominating his senses - roaring flames, hissing smoke, deafening thunder wrapping around his extremely damaged TARDIS - for a moment he could hear only the steady plink of each maroon drop as it lost its battle to cling to his leg, falling to the grating with sick finality.

His moment didn’t last. His mind seared with his own pain and the pain of his beloved time ship; her weak, silent echoes of sorrow and anguish wrapped around his consciousness, ripping him from within his own mind. Every last terrifying, disturbing sound slammed into his one functioning ear like a tidal wave. He tried to move, stand and go to the console to do something for his swiftly fading TARDIS, but his spinal chord was severed somewhere around his T12 vertabrae and his legs were nothing more than useless slabs of muscle and tendon and bone.

The more conscious he became, the more he began to notice the heat spreading between his hearts and sliding through his veins, making his limbs tingle. He blinked hard - once, twice, three times - and then he saw it: the dull but slowly brightening golden glow, vibrating just below his skin. The signs of a new life beginning that he didn’t want. Couldn’t want. Would never deserve. 

His eyes filled with stinging tears. He didn’t want to regenerate. He deserved to die, a broken, disgusting mess on the floor of his everything, with the blood of more species on his hands than he had hearts in his chest. 

A sick part of him - or maybe a logical part of him, at this point he couldn’t tell - wanted him to believe that wiping out the Daleks didn’t count. Didn’t matter. If they hadn’t existed, no one would have died. No war would have occurred, or have been blown to such a size and state of horror that it threatened every corner of the known and unknown universe, parallels included. It started with the Daleks. Not his fault. He saved existence. He saved time.

But he didn’t save Gallifrey. He burned it. 

He burned children. He burned the cities and the people and the red grass fields, and the shining silver trees that would glow by the light of the twin suns. 

He’d burned those out, too. Burned the suns. His blazing TARDIS was the only light for millions of miles. He was surrounded by dark. The twin suns, now twin black holes. The shining world of the seven systems, now the cold scattered rock of no system at all. 

His mental energy was dimming even as his regeneration energy brightened. He began to shine like his forests never would again, like the smiles of his people once had so long ago, until he burst in a powerful explosion of light, not unlike the explosion of his planet in its violence. He wanted to scream but his vocal chords had drowned in blood long before he could try.

But suddenly, there was no more blood, no more sense as the energy burst from him in a solid wave, morphing and repairing and reviving him. No more pain. Only the golden heat of life. Unwelcome, stubborn, terrifying life.

And he screamed. Oh, how he screamed, until his newly constructed throat felt raw from the effort. The pain was blinding as the noise was forced through parts of him as they were still forming. He wanted this new, undeserved throat to burn. He wanted to burn, like the tears still falling from his brand new pair of tainted eyes.

The Doctor lay splayed on the floor of the only anything he had left, helpless to fight back the searing energy as it swam through the last of him, changed and revitalized each of his cells. The pale, long-fingered hands he'd tangled painfully through his blood-matted curls were now rough and tanned, meant for clenching and fighting and slamming into hard surfaces. The thick hairs wrapped tightly through his fists were suddenly too short to hold on to at all, prickling against the fresh, hard skin of his new palms. His lanky, lean build was neither lanky nor lean, not any more. His new legs curled up against his ribs, feeling as though they not only had the ability to move, they craved it. They wanted to run. To kick. To escape and defend. His refreshed hearts thundered against his broadened chest and his new, painfully starved stomach churned against his flat, rough abdomen. His long, sinewy arms and marginally wider shoulders wrapped around his knees, and he buried an unknown face against them as his foreign yet completely familiar body shook with anger and bitterness and confusion. His now harder, tighter jaw quivered as burning tears rolled down his face like lava, following the sharp contours of his cheekbones.

He didn’t think his tears were new. They tasted the same.


End file.
